*** Welcome to piglix ***

Backyard Worlds

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9
Type of site
Citizen science project
Available in English
Website www.backyardworlds.org
Commercial No
Registration Optional
Launched 15 February 2017;
3 months ago
 (2017-02-15)
Current status Online

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a citizen science project which is part of Zooniverse. It aims to discover new brown dwarf stars and other low-mass stars, some of which might be among the nearest neighbors of our solar system, and might conceivably detect Planet Nine. The principal investigator is Marc Kuchner.

Backyard Worlds was launched in February 2017. The users, principally members of the general public, search through infrared images captured by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) sky survey, in the wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 micrometers. The images are noisy, which hampers the use of automated image processing software.

In June 2017, it was announced that Backyard Worlds had made its first official discovery: a brown dwarf designated WISEA 1101+5400, of spectral type T5.5 and located 34 parsecs (111 light years) from Earth. A paper announcing the discovery was accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, and Backyard Worlds now holds the record among all Zooniverse projects as having the shortest time from project launch to first publication.

In addition, as of June 2017, an additional twelve candidate brown dwarf discoveries were awaiting confirmation.


...
Wikipedia

...